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MONDAY

Dad got fired! Didn't we see that one coming a mile away. This whole restructuring business.

Mom phoned around 11:00 a.m. and she spent only ten minutes giving me the news. She had to get back to Dad, who was out on the back patio, in shock, looking out over Silicon Valley. She said we'll have to talk longer tomorrow. I got off the phone and my head was buzzing.

* * *

The results came in from the overnight stress tests - the tests we run to try to locate bugs in the code - and there were five breaks. Five! So I had my work cut out for me today. Nine days until shipping.

Right.

* * *

I telephoned Susan over in Mac Applications. The news about Dad was too important for e-mail, and we had lunch together in the big cafeteria in Building Sixteen that resembles the Food Fair at any halfway decent mall. Today was Mongolian sticky rice day.

Susan was hardly surprised about IBM dumping Dad. She told me that when she was briefly on the OS/2 version 1.0 team, they sent her to the IBM branch in Boca Raton for two weeks. Apparently IBM was asking people from the data entry department whether they wanted to train to be programmers.

"If they hadn't been doing boneheaded shit like that, your dad would still have a job."

* * *

I've been thinking: I get way too many pieces of e-mail, about 60 a day This is a typical number at Microsoft. E-mail is like highways - if you have them, traffic follows.

I'm an e-mail addict. Everybody at Microsoft is an addict. The future of e-mail usage is being pioneered right here. The cool thing with e-mail is that when you send it, there's no possibility of connecting with the person on the other end. It's better than phone answering machines, because with them, the person on the other line might actually pick up the phone and you might have to talk.

Typically, everybody has about a 40 percent immediate cull rate - those pieces of mail you can delete immediately because of a frivolous tag line. What you read of the remaining 60 percent depends on how much of a life you have. The less of a life, the more mail you read.

Abe has developed a "rules-based" software program that anticipates his e-mail preferences and sifts and culls accordingly. I guess that's sort of like Antonella's personal secretary program for cats.

* * *

After lunch, I drove down 156th Street to the Uwajima-Ya Japanese supermarket and bought Karla some seaweed and cucumber rolls. They also sell origami paper by the sheet there, so I threw in some cool colored papers as an extra bonus.

When I got back to the office, I knocked on Karla's door and gave her the rolls and the paper. She seemed glad enough to see me (she didn't scowl) and genuinely surprised that I had brought her something.

She asked me to sit in her office. She has a big poster of a MIPS chip blueprint on her wall and some purple and pink flowers in a bud vase, just like Mary Tyler Moore. She said that it was kind of me to bring her a Japanese seaweed roll and everything, but at the moment she was in the middle of a pack of Skittles. Would I like some?

And so we sat and ate Skittles. I told her about my dad and she just listened. And then she told me that her own father operates a small fruit cannery in Oregon. She said that she learned about coding from canning lines - or rather, she developed a fascination for linear logic processes there - and she actually has a degree in manufacturing processes, not computer programming. And she folded one of those origami birds for me. Her IQ must be about 800.

* * *

IQs are one of the weird things about Microsoft - you only find the right-hand side of the bell curve on-Campus. There's nobody who's two-digit. Just one more reason it's such a sci-fi place to work.

* * *

Anyway, we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it's so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn't like being 50 a hundred years ago when you'd probably be dead.

I told Karla about Bug Barbecue's philosophy: If you can't make yourself worthwhile to society, then that's your problem, not society's. Bug says people are personally responsible for keeping themselves relevant. Somehow, this doesn't seem quite right to me.

Karla speaks with such precision. It's so cool. She said that everyone worrying about rioting senior citizens is probably premature. She said that it's a characteristic of where we are right now on computer technology's ease-of-use curve that fiftysomethings are a bit slow at accepting technology.

"Our generation has all of the characteristics needed to be in the early-adopter group - time for school and no pesky unlearning to be done. But the barriers for user acceptance should be vanishing soon enough for fiftysomethings."

This made me feel better for Dad.

Michael came by just then to ask about a subroutine and I realized it was time for me to leave. Karla thanked me again for the food, and I was glad I had brought it along.

* * *

Caroline from the Word offices in Building Sixteen sent e-mail regarding the word "nerd." She says the word only came into vogue around the late '70s when Happy Days was big on TV - eerily the same time that the PC was being popularized. She said prior to that, there was no everyday application for the word, "and now nerds run the world!"

* * *

Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style - everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.

* * *

I walked by Michael's office around sundown, just before I left for home for a shower and a snack before coming back to stomp the bugs. He was playing a game on his monitor screen I'd never seen before.

I asked him what it was and he told me it was something he had designed himself. It was a game about a beautiful kingdom on the edge of the world that saw time coming to an end.

However, the kingdom had found a way to trick God. It did this by converting its world into code - into bits of light and electricity that would keep pace with time as it raced away from them. And thus the kingdom would live forever, after time had come to an end.

Michael said the citizens of the kingdom were allowed to do this because they had made it to the end of history without ever having had the blood of war spill on their soil. He said it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.

"Well," I said after he finished, "how about those Mariners!"

* * *

Oh - Abe bought a trampoline. He went to Costco to stock up on Jif, and he ended up buying a trampoline - 14-x-14-foot, 196 square feet of bouncy aerobic fun. Since when do grocery stores sell trampolines? What a screwy decade. I guess that's what it's like to be a millionaire.

The delivery guys dropped it off and around midnight we set it up in the front yard, over the crop circles, chaining one of the legs to the front railing. Bug Barbecue is already printing up a release he's going to make Abe have all the neighbors with kids sign, absolving Abe of any blame in the event of an accident.

TUESDAY

Woke up super early today, after only four hours' sleep, to a watery light outside. High overcast clouds. Through my window I saw a plane fly over the house, headed into SeaTac, and it made me remember when 747s first came out. Boeing had a PR photo of a kid building a house of cards in the lounge up in the bubble. God, I wanted to be that kid. Then I got to wondering, Why am I bothering to get up? What is the essential idea that gets me out of bed and through the day? What is it that gets anybody out of bed? I figure I still want to be that kid building a house of cards in a 747.

I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with three bowls of Cap'n Crunch - had raw gobbets of mouth-beef dangling onto my tongue all day. It hurt like crazy, and it made me talk with a Cindy Brady lisp until late afternoon.

* * *

Spent two hours in the morning trapped in a room with the Pol Pots from Marketing. God, they never stop - like we don't have anything better to do eight days before shipping. Even the bug testers. Like, we're supposed to see a box of free Dove Bars and say, "Oh - it's okay then - please, please waste my time."

I think everyone hates and dreads Marketing's meetings because of how these meetings alter your personality. At meetings you have to explain what you've accomplished, so naturally you fluff up your work a bit, like pillows on a couch. You end up becoming this perky, gung-ho version of yourself that you know is just revolting. I have noticed that everybody looks down upon the gung-ho type people at Microsoft, but nobody considers themselves gung-ho. They should just see themselves at these meetings, all frat boy and chipper. Fortunately, gung-ho-ishness seems confined exclusively to marketing meetings. Otherwise I think the Campus is utterly casual.

Oh, and sometimes you get flame meetings. They're fun, too - when everyone flames everyone else.

Today's meeting was about niggly little shipping details and was numbingly dull. And then, near the end, a Motorola pager owned by Kent, one of the Marketing guys, went off on top of the table. It buzzed like a hornet and shimmied and twitched across the table in a dance of death. It was mesmerizing, like watching a tarantula scamper across the table. It killed all conversation dead. Killed it right on the spot.

My smiling-muscles hurt as a result of the meeting. On top of my Cap'n Crunch mouth. A bad mouth day.

* * *

I called Mom right after the meeting and Dad answered the phone. I heard Oprah on in the background, and I didn't think that was a good omen. Dad sounded upbeat, but isn't that a part of the process? Denial? I asked him if he was watching Oprah and he said he had only come into the house for a snack.

Mom came on the phone on the extension, and once Dad was off the line, she confided that he barely slept the night before, and when he did, he made haunted moaning noises. And then this morning he dressed, as though headed to the office, and sat watching TV, being eerily chipper, refusing to talk about what his plans were. Then he went out into the garage to work on his model train world.

* * *

I learned a new word today: "trepanation" - drilling a hole in the skull to relieve pressure on the brain.

* * *

Karla came into my office this morning - a first - just as I was logging onto my e-mail for the morning. She was holding a big cardboard box full of acrylic Windows coffee mugs from the company store in Building Fourteen. "Guess what everyone in the Karla universe is getting for Christmas this year?" she asked cheerfully. "They're on sale." There was a pause. "You want one, Dan?"

I said that I drink too much coffee and colas, and that I'm a colon cancer statistic just waiting to happen. I said I'd love one. She handed it to me and there was a pause as she looked around my office: an NEC MultiSync monitor; a Compaq workhorse monitor; a framed Jazz poster; a "Mac Hugger" bumper sticker on my ceiling and my black-and-white photo shrine to Microsoft VP Steve Ballmer. "The shrine started as a joke," I said, "but it's sort of taking on a life of its own now. It's getting scary. Shall we worship?"

It was then that she asked me, in a lowered tone, "Who's Jed?"

She had seen me keyboard in my password - like HAL from 2001.

And so I closed the door and told her about Jed, and you know, I was glad I was able to tell someone at last.

* * *

Mid-afternoon, Bug, Todd, Michael, and I grabbed some road-Snapples in the kitchen and headed over to pick up some manuals at the library, out behind the Administration building. It was more of a fresh-air jaunt than anything else.

It was raining quite heavily, but Bug pulled his usual stunt. He made us all walk through the Campus's forest undergrowth instead of simply taking the pleasant winding path that meanders through the Campus trees - the Microsoft path that speaks of Wookiees and Smurfs amid the salal, ornamental plums, rhododendrons, Japanese maple, arbutus, huckleberry, hemlock, cedars, and firs.

Bug believes that Bill sits at his window in the Admin Building and watches how staffers walk across the Campus. Bug believes that Bill keeps note of who avoids the paths and uses the fastest routes to get from A to B, and that Bill rewards these devil-may-care trailblazers with promotions and stock, in the belief that their code will be just as innovative and dashing.

We all ended up soaking wet, with Oregon Grape stains on our Dockers by the time we got to the library, and on the way back we read the Riot Act and said that Bug had to stop geeking out and learn to enculturate, and that for his own good he should take the path - and he agreed. But we could see that it was killing Bug - literally killing him - to have to walk along the path past where Bill's office is supposed to be.

Todd toyed with Bug and got him going on the subject of Xerox PARC, thus getting Bug all bitter and foaming. Bug is still in a sort of perpetual grief that Xerox PARC dropped the football on so many projects.

And then Michael, who had been silent up to now, said, "Hey - if you cut over this berm, it's a little faster," and he cut off the path, and Bug's eyes just about popped out of his head, and Michael found a not bad shortcut. Right outside the Admin Building.

* * *

I realize I haven't seen a movie in six months. I think the last one was Curly Sue on the flight to Macworld Expo, and that hardly counted. I really need a life, bad.

* * *

It turns out Abe has entrepreneurial aspirations. We had dinner in the down stairs cafeteria together (Indonesian Bamay with frozen yogurt and double espresso). He's thinking of quitting and becoming a pixelation broker - going around to museums and buying the right to digitize their paintings. It's a very "Rich Microsoft" thing to do. Microsoft's millionaires are the first generation of North American nerd wealth.

Once Microsofters' ships come in, they travel all over: Scotland and Patagonia and Thailand . . . Conde Nast Traveler-ish places. They buy Shaker furniture, Saabs, koi, Pilchuk glass, native art, and 401(K)s to the max. The ultrarichies build fantasy homes on the Samamish Plateau loaded with electronic toys.

It's all low-key spending, mostly, and fresh and fun. Nobody's buying crypts, I notice - though when the time comes that they do, said crypts will no doubt be emerald and purple colored, and lined with Velcro and Gore-Tex.

Abe, like most people here, is a fiscal Republican, but otherwise, pretty empty-file in the ideology department. Vesting turns most people into fiscal Republicans, I've noticed.

* * *

The day went quickly. The rain is back again, which is nice. The summer was too hot and too dry for a Washington boy like me.

I am going to bring in some Japanese UFO-brand yaki soba tomorrow and see if Karla is into lunch. She needs carbs. Skittles and aspartame is no diet for a coder.

Well, actually, it is.

* * *

A thought: Sometimes the clouds and sunlight will form in a way you've never seen them do before, and your city will feel as if it's another city altogether. On the Campus today at sunset, people were stopping on the grass watching the sun turn stove-filament orange through the rain clouds.

It's just something I noticed. It made me realize that the sun is really built of fire. It made me feel like an animal, not a human.

* * *

Worked until 1:30 a.m. When I got in, Abe was down in his microbrewery in the garage, puttering amid the stacks of furniture handed down by parents - stuff too ugly to meet even the minimal taste standards of the upstairs rooms, the piles of golf clubs, the mountain bikes, and a line of suitcases, perched like greyhounds awaiting the word GO!

Bug was locked behind his door, but by the smell I could tell he was eating a microwaved Dinty Moore product.

Susan was in the living room asleep in front of a taped Seinfeld episode.

Todd was obsessively folding his shirts in his room.

Michael was rereading The Chronicles of Narnia for the 87th time.

A nice average night.

I went into my room, which, like all six of the bedrooms here, is filled up almost completely with a bed, with walls lined with IKEA "Billy" bookshelves and stereo equipment, jazz posters and Sierra Club calendars. On my desk sits a Sudafed box and a pile of stones from a beach in Oregon. My PC is hooked up by modem to the Campus.

Had a Tab (a Bill favorite) and some microwave popcorn and did some unfinished work.

WEDNESDAY

Well, it would seem that Bug Barbecue's theory might be correct after all. Michael got invited to lunch today with (oh God, I can barely input the letters . . .) B-B-B-B-B-I-L-L!

The news traveled around Building Seven like lightning just around 11:30. Needless to say, we tumbled into Bug's office like puppies within seconds of getting word, tripping over his piles of soldering guns, wires, R-Kive boxes, and empty CD jewel boxes. Of course, he went mad with grief. We totally needled him:

"You know, Bug, the deciding factor must have been Michael's walking over that berm and making that incredible shortcut. I tell you, Bill saw Michael make that call of genius and now I bet he's going to give Michael his own product group. You shouldn't have listened to us, man. We're losers. We're going nowhere. Now, Michael - he's a winner."

Actually, the invitation probably had more to do with the code Michael wrote during the bunkering last Friday, but we didn't tell Bug this.

* * *

During the two hours Michael was away, time ticked by slowly. The curiosity was unbearable and we were all giddy and restless. We emerged from our offices into corridors of caged whimsy, amid our Far Side cartoons taped to windows, Pepsi-can sculptures taped to the walls, and inflatable sharks hanging from the ceilings, all lit by full-spectrum, complexion-flattering lighting.

We lapsed into one of our weekly-ish communal stress-relieving frenzies - we swiped sheets of bubble-pak from the supply rooms and rolled over them with our office chairs, popping hundreds of plastic zits at a go. We punished plastic troll dolls with 5-irons, blasting them down the hallway, putting yet more divots in the particle board walls and the ceiling panels. We drank Tabs and idly slagged interactive CD technology (Todd: "I used the Philips GDI system-it's like trying to read a coffee table book with all of the pages glued together.").

Finally Michael came back and walked past everybody, oblivious to the sensation of his presence, and entered his office. I walked over to his door.

"Hi, Michael." Pause. "Soooooo . . . ?"

"Hello, Daniel. I have to fly to Cupertino tonight. Some kind of Macintosh assignment they're putting me on."

"What was, well - he - like?"

"Oh, you know . . . efficient. People forget that he is medically, biologically, a genius. Not one ummm or ahhhh from his mouth all lunch; no wasted brain energy. Truly an inspiration for us all. I told him about my Flatlander flat-foods-only concept, and we then got into a discussion of beverages, which, as you know, tend to be consumed with a straw in a linear, one-dimensional (and hence not two-dimensional) mode. Beverages are a real problem to my new Flatlander dining lifestyle, Daniel, let me tell you.

"But then Bill -" (first name basis!) "- pointed out that one-dimensionality is perfectly allowable within a two-dimensional universe. So obvious, yet I hadn't seen it! Good thing he's in charge. Oh - Daniel, can I borrow your suitcase? Mine has all my old Habitrail gerbil mazes in it, and I don’t want to take them out and then have to repack them all when I return."

"Sure, Michael."

"Thanks." He booted up his computer. "I guess I'd better prepare for the trip. Where did I store that file - you'd think Lucy Ricardo handled my information for me. Well, Daniel - we'll talk later on?" He looked for something underneath a cardboard box containing a '60s Milton-Bradley game of Memory.

He then looked up at me, gave me an 'I want to return to the controllable and nonthreatening world inside my computer' stare. You have to respect this, so the rest of the crew and I left him inside his office, clicking away on his board, knowing that Michael, like a young beauty swept out of a small Nebraska town by some Hollywood Daddy-O, was soon to leave our midst for headier airs, never to return.

* * *

Mom called. Dad stuff - after not sleeping all night again, he dressed for work and then went into the garage once more to work on his model trains. When she tries to talk about the firing, he gets all jolly and brushes it away, saying the future's just going to be fine. But he has no details. No pictures of what comes next.

* * *

Dad called. From his den. He wanted to know what the employment situation was like at Microsoft for someone like him. I couldn't believe it. So now I'm worried about him. He should know better. I guess it's shock.

I told him to relax, to not even try to think about doing anything for at least a few more days until the shock wears off. He acted all hurt, as if I was trying to get rid of him. He wasn't himself. I tried to tell him what Karla had told me, about fiftysomethings now just entering the ease-of-use curve with new technologies, but he wouldn't listen. It ended on a bad note, and this bugged me, but I didn't know one other practical thing I could say.

* * *

I went to Uwajima-Ya and bought some UFO yaki soba noodles, the ones that steep in hot water in their own little plastic bowl. Amid all the lunch-with-Bill foofaraw, Karla and me managed to eat together. I asked her what her seven Jeopardy! dream categories would be - I told her about everyone else's, and she considered these as she twisted the yaki soba noodles in the little plastic dish, and then she said "they would have to be:"

• Orchards

• Labrador dogs

• The history of phone pranks

• Crime novels

• Intel chips

• Things HAL says in 2001, and

• My parents are psychopaths.

She then said to me, "Dan, I have a question about identity for you. Here it is: What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?"

I got all ready to blurt out an answer but then nothing came out of my mouth.

The question seemed so obvious to start with, but when I thought about it, I realized how difficult it is - and sort of depressing, because there's really not very much that distinguishes anyone from anyone else. I mean, what makes one mallard duck different from any other mallard duck? What makes one grizzly bear different from any other grizzly bear? Identity is so tenuous - based on so little, when you really consider it.

"Their personality?" I lamely replied. "Their, uhhh, soul?"

"Maybe. I think I'm beginning to believe the soul theory, myself. Last June I went to my ten-year high school reunion. Everyone's body had certainly aged over the decade, but everyone's essence was essentially the same as it had been when we were all in kindergarten. Their spirits were the same, I guess. Dana McCulley was still a phony; Norman Tillich was still a jock; Eileen Kelso was still shockingly naive. Their bodies may have looked different, but they were absolutely the same person underneath. I decided that night that people really do have spirits. It's a silly thing to believe. I mean, silly for a logical person like me."

* * *

As reality returned in mid-afternoon, my "boss," Shaw, came in for a hand-holding session. Shaw is a set-for-lifer. If you had to kill off all of the program managers, one by one, he would be the last to go - he has fourteen direct reports (serfs) underneath him.

Shaw really wanted me to have a juicy problem so he could help me deal with it, but the only problem I could think of was how we're never going to make our shipping deadline in seven days, and with Michael gone, that's just more work for all of us. But this problem wasn't juicy enough for him, so he went off in search of a more exotically troubled worker.

Shaw is fortysomething, one of maybe twelve fortysomethings on the Campus. One grudgingly has to respect someone who's fortysomething and still in computers - there's a core techiness there that must be respected. Shaw still remembers the Flintstones era of computers, with punch cards and little birds inside the machines that squawked, "It's a living."

My only problem with Shaw is that he became a manager and stopped coding. Being a manager is all hand-holding and paperwork - not creative at all. Respect is based on how much of a techie you are and how much coding you do. Managers either code or don't code, and it seems there are a lot more noncoding managers these days. Shades of IBM.

Shaw actually gave me an okay review in the semiannual performance review last month, so I have no personal beef against him. And to be honest, this is still not a hierarchical office: The person with the most information pertinent to any decision is the one who makes that decision. But I'm still cannon fodder when the crunch comes.

Shaw is also a Baby Boomer, and he and his ilk are responsible for (let me rant a second) this thing called "The Unitape" - an endless loop of elevator jazz Microsoft plays at absolutely every company function. It's so irritating and it screams a certain, "We're not like our parents, we're flouting convention" blandness. One of these days it's going to turn the entire under-30 component of the company into a mob of deranged postal workers who rampage through the Administration Building with scissors and Bic lighters.

* * *

Checked the WinQuote: The stock was down 85 cents over the day. That means Bill lost $70 million today, whereas I only lost fuck all. But guess who'll sleep better?

* * *

We slaved until 1:00 a.m. and I gave Karla and Todd rides home, first making a quick run to Safeway for treats. At the cash register, while paying for our Sour Strings and nectarines, we got into the usual nerd discussion over the future of computing.

Karla said, "You can not de-invent the wheel, or radios, or, for that matter, computers. Long after we're dead, computers will continue to be developed and sooner or later - it is not a matter of if, but when - an 'Entity' is going to be created that has its own intelligence. Will this occur ten years from now? A thousand years from now? Whenever. The Entity cannot be stopped. It will happen. It cannot be de-invented.

"The critical question is, Will this Entity be something other than human? The artificial intelligence community admits it has failed to produce intelligence by trying to duplicate human logic processes. AI-ers are hoping to create life-mimicking programs that breed with each other, simulating millions of years of evolution by cross-breeding these programs together, ultimately creating intelligence - an Entity. But probably not a human entity modeled on human intelligence."

I said, "Well, Karla, we're only human - we can only know our own minds - how can we possibly know any other type of mind? What else could the Entity be? It will have sprung from our own brains - the initial algorithms, at least. There's nothing else we could be duplicating except the human mind."

Todd said that the Entity is what freaks out his ultra-religious parents. He said they're most frightened of the day when people allow machines to have initiative - the day we allow machines to set their own agendas.

"Oh God, I'm trapped in a 1950s B-movie," said Karla.

* * *

Afterward, once I was back in my room by myself, I got to mulling over our discussion. Perhaps the Entity is what people without any visions of an afterworld secretly yearn to build - an intelligence that will supply them with specific details - supply pictures.

Maybe we like to believe that Bill knows what the Entity will be. It makes us feel as though there's a moral force holding the reins of technological progress. Maybe he does know. But then maybe Bill simply provides a focus for the company when no other focus can be found. I mean, if it weren't for the cult of Bill, this place would be deadsville - like a great big office supply company. Which is sort of what it is. I mean, if you really think about it.

THURSDAY

Woke up at 8:30 and had breakfast in the cafeteria - no crunchy cereals for the next week, thank you.

Over oatmeal, Bug and me were looking at some of the foreign employees - from France, or something - who were smoking outside in the cold and rain. Only the foreign employees smoke here - and always in sad little groups. Smoking's not allowed inside anywhere. You'd think they'd get the message.

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude - they'd invent a little icon for a headwaiter that, once clicked, made you wait 45 minutes for your file. It's no surprise that user-friendliness is a concept developed on the West Coast. The guy who invented the Smiley face is running for mayor of Seattle - for real. It was in the news.

* * *

Mom phoned the minute I entered my office. She visited the garage this morning - a hot, dry Palo Alto morning with white sunlight screaming in through the cracks around the garage door - and there was Dad again in his blue IBM business suit and tie, standing in the center of his U-shaped, waist-high trainscape with just one dim light shining from the ceiling above, pushing his buttons and making the trains shunt and run and speed through mountains and over bridges.

Mom decided that enough was enough, that Dad really needed somebody to talk with - someone to listen to him. She pulled up one of the old Suzy Wong bamboo cocktail bar stools left over from the basement renovation, put aside her usual lack of enthusiasm for his model trains, and talked to Dad about them, like it was show-and-tell time.

"The model train setup has expanded since you were here last, Danny," she told me. "There's a complete small town now, and the mountains are steeper and he's put more of those little green foam trees on them. It's like Perfectville, the town where everybody's supposed to grow up. There's a

church now - and a supermarket and boxcars - he even has little drifters living inside the boxcars. And there's -"

There was a pause.

"And what, Mom?"

Still more silence.

"And - oh, Danny -" This was not easy for her to say.

I said, "And what, Mom?"

"Danny, there is a small white house on the top of the hill overlooking the town - apart from the rest of the landscape. So amongst my other questions I asked him, 'Oh, and what's that house there?' and he said to me, without breaking his pace, 'That's where Jed lives.' "

We were both quiet. Mom sighed.

"How about I come down to Palo Alto tomorrow?" I said. "There's nothing pressing here. Lord knows I have enough time owing to me."

More silence. "Could you, honey?"

I said, "Yes."

"I think that would be good."

I could hear their fridge humming down in California.

"There's so many consultants on the market right now," Mom said. "People always say that if you get downsized you can become a consultant, but your father is 53, Dan. He's not young and he's never been competitive by nature. I mean, he was at IBM. We really just don't know what is going to happen."

* * *

I called a travel agent in Bellevue and VISA'd a ticket to San Jose. I skipped e-mail and tried to focus on the overnight stress tests, but my mind was blanking. Two code breaks overnight - so close to shipping and we're still getting breaks!

I tried roaming the corridors for diversion, but somehow the world was different. Michael was in Cupertino (with my luggage); Abe wasn't in his office - he'd bailed out for the day and gone sailing in Puget Sound with some Richie Rich friends; Bug had gone into a crazy mood since breakfast and had a "Get Lost" Post-it note on his door; and Susan was at home for the day preparing for the Vest Fest. And the one other person I wanted to see, Karla, wasn't in her office.

I was leaning over the rails of the central atrium, looking at the art displays in the cases and the spent nerds flopped out on the couches below, when Shaw walked by. I had to be all hearty and rah-rah and perky about the shipping deadline.

Shaw said that Karla was away with Kent doing a marketing something-or-other, and the thought flashed through my head that I wanted to kill Kent, which was irrational and not like me.

* * *

The day then degenerated into a "Thousand Dollar Day." That's what I call the kind of day where, even if you tell all the people you know, "I'll give you a crisp, new thousand-dollar bill if you just give me a phone call and put me out of my misery," even still, nobody phones.

I only received eighteen pieces of e-mail, and most of them were bulk. And the WinQuote only went up and down by pennies. Nobody got rich; nobody got poor.

* * *

The rain broke around 3:00 and I walked around the Campus feeling miserable. I looked at all the cars parked in the lot and got exhausted just thinking about all the energy that must have gone into these people choosing just the right car. And I also noticed something Twilight-Zoney about all the cars on Campus: None of them have bumper stickers, as though everyone is censoring themselves. I guess this indicates a fear of something.

All these little fears: fear of not producing enough; fear of not finding a little white-with-red-printing stock option envelope in the pigeonhole; fear of losing the sensation of actually making something anymore; fear about the slow erosion of perks within the company; fear that the growth years will never return again; fear that the bottom line is the only thing that really drives the process; fear of disposability . . . God, listen to me. What a downer. But sometimes I think it would be so much easier to be jerking espressos in Lynwood, leaving the Tupperware-sealed, Biosphere 2-like atmosphere of Microsoft behind me.

And this got me thinking. I looked around and noticed that if you took all of the living things on the Microsoft Campus, separated them into piles, and analyzed the biomass, it would come out to:

• 38% Kentucky bluegrass

• 19% human beings

• .003% Bill

• 8% Douglas and balsam fir

• 7% Western red cedar

• 5% hemlock

• 23% other: crows, birch, insects, worms, microbes, nerd aquarium fish, decorator plants in the lobbies . .

.

* * *

Went home early at 5:30 and nobody was there. Susan had two card tables unfolded in the otherwise empty dining room area, awaiting their snacks. Abe had loaned Susan his sacred Dolby THX sound system for the party plus his two Adirondack chairs made from old skis. The place still looked a bit bare.

It was like The Day Without People.

* * *

Around dark, things started hopping. Abe returned from sailing and cranked up old Human League tunes, to which he sang along from the shower. Susan returned with bags of food from the caterers that I helped her carry in and set up: pasta puttanesca, Thai noodles, calzones, Chee-tos, and gherkins. Bug and some of his bitter, nutcase friends arrived with a wide selection of beer, and they were in good moods, sitting around playing peanut gallery to Hard Copy and A Current Affair, being amusing and eating half of Susan's party food while she was dressing.

By 8:00, other guests began arriving, bringing bottles of wine, and by 9:00, the house, which not two hours previously had been a pit of gloom, was brimming with good cheer and U2.

Around 9:30, Susan was talking with her friends, telling them that she'd vested just in the nick of time - "I've been switching from a right-lobe person to a left-lobe person over the past 18 months, and I couldn't have gone on coding much longer. Anyway, I think the era of vesting is coming to a close." The phone in my room rang just then. (We have nine lines into our house. Pacific Bell either loves us or hates us.) I excused myself to answer it.

It was Mom.

Apparently Dad had just flown up to Seattle from Palo Alto on impulse. She'd just gotten in from her library job and had found the note on the door. I asked what time his flight landed and she told me he was arriving at the airport as we spoke.

* * *

So I went and sat on the curb outside the house. It was a bit chilly and I was wearing my old basketball varsity coat. Karla walked up the hill from her place, said hello, and sat down beside me, carrying a twelve-pack of beer that seemed enormously large for her small arms. From my body language she knew that everything wasn't okay, and she didn't ask me anything. I simply said, "My Dad's just flown up here - he's come unglued. I think he'll be arriving shortly." We sat and looked at the treetops and heard the wind rustle.

"I heard you were in a marketing discussion all day with Kent," I said to

her.

"Yeah. It was unproductive. Pretty numbing. He's a creep."

"You know, I've been going through the whole day wanting to bludgeon

him."

"Really?" She said. She looked at me sideways.

"Yeah. Really."

"Well now, that's not too logical, is it?"

"No."

She then held my hand, and we sat there, together. We drank some of the beer she had brought and we said hello to Mishka the Dog, who cruised by to visit then went for a nap under the trampoline. And we watched the cars that pulled up to the house, one by one, waiting for the one car that would contain my father.

* * *

He arrived not too long afterward, in a rental car, piss drunk (not sure how he swung that), looking tired and scared, with big bags under his eyes, and a bit deranged.

He parked with a lurch right across the street from us. We sat and watched as he sucked in a breath and leaned back on the seat, his head slumped forward. He then turned his head toward us and through the open window said, a bit bashfully, "Hi."

"Hi, Dad."

He looked back down at his lap.

"Dad, this is Karla," I said, still seated.

He looked at us again. "Hello, Karla."

"Hi."

We sat on our opposite sides of the road. Behind us, the house had become a thumping shadow box of festivity. Dad didn't look up from his lap, so Karla and I stood up and walked over to him, and as we did, we saw that Dad was clutching something tight in his lap, and as we approached, he clutched it tighter. It seemed as though he was afraid we might take away whatever it was, and as we neared, I realized he was holding Jed's old football helmet, a little boy's helmet, in gold and green, the old school colors.

"Danny," he said to me, not to my face, but into the helmet which he polished with his old man's hands, "I still miss Jeddie. I can't get him out of my mind."

"I miss Jed, too, Daddy," I said. "I think about him every day."

He held the helmet tighter to his chest.

"Come on, Daddy - let's get out of the car. Come on into the house. We can talk in there."

"I can't pretend I don't think about him anymore. I think it's killing me."

"I feel the same way, too, Daddy. You know what? I feel as if he's alive still, and that he's always walking three steps ahead of me, just like a king."

I opened the door and Karla and I both supported Dad on either side as he clutched the helmet to his chest, and we walked into the house, his appearance generating little interest in the overall crowd. We went into Michael's room, where we placed him on the bed.

He was ranting a bit: "Funny how all those things you thought would never end turned out to be the first to vanish - IBM, the Reagans, Eastern bloc communism. As you get older, the bottom line becomes to survive as best you can."

"We don't know about that yet, Daddy."

I pulled off his shoes, and for some time Karla and I sat beside him on two office chairs. Michael's machines hummed around us and our only light source was a small bedside lamp. We sat and watched Dad filter in and out of consciousness.

He said to me, "You are my treasure, son. You are my first born. When the doctors removed their hands from your mother and lifted you up to the sky, it was as though they removed a trove of pearls and diamonds and rubies all covered in sticky blood."

I said, "Daddy, don't talk like that. Get some rest. You'll find a job. I'll always support you. Don't feel bad. There'll be lots of stuff available. You'll see."

"It's your world now," he said, his breathing deepening, as he turned to stare at the wall that thumped with music and shrieks of party-goers. "It's yours."

And shortly after that, he fell asleep on the bed - on Michael's bed in Michael's room.

And before we left the room, we turned out the light and we took one last look at the warm black form of my father lying on the bed, lit only by the constellation of red, yellow, and green LEDs from Michael's sleeping, dreaming machines